Reblogging: Plagiarism, Flattery, or the Next Big Thing?

by Lorraine B. Elder

I just had my first encounter with reblogging and am trying to sort out what I think about it. I discovered that someone had pulled most of a post from this blog into his own blog, displaying the post as if it were part of his site. Here’s my thought process so far.

Thought 1: Eek, I’ve been plagiarized!

However, the reblogger did properly attribute the work to me and included links to my university department’s web site and to this blog, where the article was first published. The reblogger included my department’s logo on his site, although the logo has been enlarged inappropriately to the point of being unattractively pixelated. The reblogger’s very slight alterations to the original article don’t sit entirely well with me, but they aren’t offensive or disrespectful.

Thought 2: I’m flattered.

The ego kicked in and I felt flattered that the reblogger thought enough of my post to make it more widely available. But I wondered why he didn’t take the time to add value in the form of commentary or insight of his own. Given the type of work the reblogger does, he certainly should be aware of netiquette and should know better than to just post the work of others on his own site. Worse, on a second page on his site, he has posted a well-known list of good practices for teaching, but he doesn’t attribute them to their source. Do I detect a trend?

Thought 3: OMG, what if he’d been a pornographer instead of an educator?

Okay, it’s not likely that a pornographer would reblog anything of mine (whew!). But the thought made me aware of my differing standards depending on who is pilfering my work. I suspect this reblogger is just getting started in the blogging game. His site is pretty sparse (which is no excuse for swiping other people’s stuff, mind you). Because he appears to be in education and not multilevel marketing or Viagra sales, and because he did provide proper attribution, I’m trying to cut him a little slack, and I’m mindful of the concept of fair use. If his site had been sleazy or salesy, I’d probably have sent him a take-down notice, perhaps beginning with the salutation “Dear Thief” or “Yo, Scumbag.” Instead, I’m blogging about him, more or less politely.

Thought 4: He’s wasting web resources and skewing my analytics.

It would have been more efficient from a web resources standpoint for him to simply link to the original post rather than redisplaying a significant portion of it on his site, and that would have been more polite, too, in my opinion. By posting my stuff on his site, he makes it harder for me to get a good picture of this blog’s readership.

Thought 5: Is reblogging the long form of the Twitter retweet?

On Twitter it’s common practice for people to repost information originally posted by others. In fact, redistributing others’ tweets is expected and rewarded. Does reblogging extend that practice to forms of writing longer than 140 characters? If so, I can see why the news wire services are miffed about the practice. But is this where some portions of the web are headed? Really, how different is reblogging from embedding a YouTube or Vimeo video? Those sites even provide the handy code for the embeds.

Thought 6: Am I a hopeless geezer mired in an old worldview?

Honestly, how hard would it have been for him to ask if he could republish the material? Or was his pingback in fact his way of asking? I’m fairly new to WordPress myself, so I haven’t yet entirely figured out common practices surrounding pingbacks and trackbacks.

Plenty has been written about differences between how Boomers and Gen Xers view ownership and attribution (respectively, “It’s mine and you must pay for it” and “It’s mine but I’ll share it with you”) as compared to the view of Gen Yers (“Everything belongs to everyone for free”). That translates, roughly, to copyright vs. Creative Commons vs. public domain. Does my initial reaction to his reblogging mean I am just an old-timer who hasn’t caught up with the current thinking?

Decision: Take a Creative Commons view

Although no copyright notice nor Creative Commons license was displayed on the original blog post (now rectified), ultimately I decided to act as if I had posted the article under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This version of the CC license allows for derivative works, and I decided to treat his reblogging of my article as a derivative work.

I’m not sure this is the best reaction, but I’m trying it on for size. I’m pretty sure my decision would be different if the original article were longer, say the length of a scholarly paper, or if my income depended entirely on my blog posts. And my decision might change if the same person makes a habit of grabbing content from this blog rather than posting comments here or writing his own thoughts at his blog and linking to content here. Still, I’m almost grateful to the reblogger because he has forced me to reconsider my positions on the topic of reuse.

Your thoughts?

I’d like to hear about what you think of reblogging. Is it common? Do you like it? How do you handle it? Are rebloggers lazy sponges, or are they discerning connoisseurs of information? What is proper reblogging etiquette? Does it vary depending on the source of the original material (say, a commercial site) and the use of the material on the reblogger’s site (say, an education-oriented site)? Are rebloggers the new spammers, or is reblogging a good way to redistribute information to a wider audience? Will it soon be common for each piece of original online content to be reblogged multiple times, and will this be viewed as a public service rather than infringement?

This blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Why You Shouldn’t Use PowerPoints in (Most) Online Courses

by Lorraine B. Elder

Sigh. Where to begin? There are so many reasons why using PowerPoint for online courses is a Bad Idea. PowerPoint is just a tool, of course, but it’s so often the wrong tool for the job, especially in teaching online. A hammer is only a tool, but in the wrong hands, well, it makes a mess of things. So it is with PowerPoint.

It’s not that PowerPoint—henceforth referred to as PPT—can’t be used effectively for teaching online. It’s just that most people have developed deplorable PPT habits and now believe that textually dense PPT slides, cheesy animated transitions, and gaudy 3-D graphs are de rigueur for teaching in the classroom and therefore are the perfect choice for online courses, too. To that I say “Nuh-uh. Not. FAIL!” Who else says so? Well, these guys:

Don McMillan, Life After Death by PowerPoint

This video humorously highlights the problems of bad PPTs.

Guy Kawasaki, The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint

Although Kawasaki is targeting entrepreneurs rather than educators, his points still generally apply.

Edward Tufte, PowerPoint Is Evil

Information design guru Edward Tufte has long decried the evils of PowerPoint, even going so far as to suggest that “stupefying fragments” of reasoning split across multiple PPT slides might have contributed to a space shuttle disaster. The following image is from his commentary on the Columbia explosion. Click the image to see a larger version.

The gist of their criticism is that too many people use PPT poorly even in the situations for which it was designed, namely in-person presentations. The slides tend to serve as a crib sheet for the presenter rather than informing the audience. Now imagine those problems multiplied when a PPT presentation that was awful enough in person gets posted online without the benefit of an instructor to explain the lacunae. Online students assaulted by bad PPT can’t even pelt the instructor with tomatoes.

The Crux of the PPT Problem: Missing Information

A PPT slide, when used to good effect in the situations for which it was designed, contains a single important bit of information. The individual giving the presentation in person is expected to orally set the context, explain the rationale, fill in the details, identify nuances and counterpoints, extrapolate, and draw conclusions from the nugget on the slide. The problem with posting such slides online should be immediately obvious: without the presenter, the slide is next to useless because all of the supporting information is missing.

“Ah ha!” you say. “That must be an argument in favor of putting full paragraphs on slides.” Um, no. If you feel the need to write full paragraphs to explain whatever it is you’re teaching online, fine. But don’t put them on a PPT slide. Put them on a web page. Web pages are pretty good at handling lots of text, as well as audio, video, and other media. PPT isn’t.

Basically, a PPT presentation that was well constructed for an in-person presentation is inadequate for an online course. And a PPT presentation that sucked in person will suck worse online.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at these:

Robert X. Cringely, If We’re in Trouble, Its Probably Because People No Longer Really Listen

A highlight of Cringely’s post is this paragraph:

PowerPoint is supposed to play the role of the nerdy kid from the A/V department who keeps all your slides straight and makes you look good. But more often than not, I get the stack without the presenter, and no matter how smart or informed I am, any solo effort to expend that stack into an adequate proxy for a 10,000-word document is simply bound to come up short.

Olivia Mitchell, New Evidence That Bullet-Points Don’t Work

Mitchell describes a presentation given by Chris Atherton, a cognitive psychologist who delivered an 86-slide presentation (ack!) on how to design slides that work with the human brain instead of against it. Although I imagine the presentation was fascinating and informative if you were there to see it live, clicking through the slide deck leaves you feeling that something (clue: it’s a person) is missing. Dr. Atherton’s slides are adequate (if overly abundant) for in-person delivery. But posted online without the benefit of her descriptive explanation and insight, they are not entirely helpful and certainly aren’t substantive enough for a student to learn from and be tested on. BTW, if you’re sick of reading this blog post, see Dr. Atherton’s slides 51–54 to get the quick and dirty summary of the point. Slide 71 is also pithy.

Why Are Instructors So Eager, Nay Insistent, about Putting Their PPTs Online?

Lots of reasons, but mostly these:

• Instructors have a large library of PPTs they’ve built up over the years
• Instructors already know how to use PPT and don’t want to learn a new tool or process
• Instructors think their PPTs are crystal clear (r-i-i-ght…)
• Instructors’ sense of self has become scarily entwined with their PPTs
• Instructors have gotten bad advice
• Instructors don’t realize that not all students have access to PPT

I’ll address each.

Instructors have a large library of PPTs they’ve built up over the years

So what? I have a large library of audio cassettes that I recorded years ago from my vinyl record albums and then lovingly hand-labeled with a calligraphy pen. They are stashed in a drawer, representing cherished memories, especially since I sold all the vinyl at a yard sale. But do I actually listen to them? Heck no! Like most people, I’ve upgraded to digital recordings from Amazon, iTunes, and Magnatune. I also listen to compilations on Pandora. The digital versions sound better, are more easily organized and searched, and they don’t degrade the more often I listen.

If your PPTs are more than two years old, you probably need to update them anyway so that the information reflects the current thinking and latest research in your academic discipline. And it wouldn’t hurt to root out those typos and embarrassing spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. While you’re at it, get rid of the illegible tiny type and the annoying SCRIPT IN ALL CAPS. Also ditch the ugly lavender-on-pea-green color scheme and the not-as-cute-as-you-think animated clip art.

Illegible

Ugly and Hard to Read

Not Cute

My point: musty old PPTs aren’t as valuable as you think. It’s time to move on. And since you’re gonna have to update your material anyway, you might as well do it in a new way.

Instructors already know how to use PPT and don’t want to learn a new tool or process

Instructors seem to forget that they weren’t born knowing how to use PPT. They had to learn to use it, and now it’s time to learn how to use something else. Some instructors think they’re too old, too tired, too busy, or too important to learn new stuff. Others are technophobic and afraid to ask for help, thinking it would signal weakness and vulnerability.

But if you don’t update your skills, you’ll fail to connect with your 21st-century students and will get lousy course evaluations. Online instruction and Web 2.0 tools differ from in-person instruction, and if you don’t learn the differences and adapt your teaching methods accordingly, you’ll hear about it from students. Many new tools focus on ease of use and time savings, so you might discover that new approaches are easier than you imagine.

My point: you owe it to your students (and yourself) to make time to learn new skills, and you don’t have to go it alone. Seek assistance from the faculty development, educational technology, or online learning department on your campus.

Instructors think their PPTs are crystal clear

If your PPT slides are well designed for an in-person presentation, they are too cryptic to post as a standalone online presentation. Terse one- or two-word slides often are understood only by the person who wrote them or by experts in the field. To students, who are novices, more detail is needed to provide a fuller explanation. In person, you provide that detail by speaking. Online, you still need to provide the detail that the slides lack.

If, on the other hand, your PPT slides are an outline of lecture notes or are chock full of explanatory text and complex diagrams, then PPT is the wrong medium for posting that information online. Instead use media that work well online: web pages containing embedded links, images, audio clips, video clips, and the like.

My point: slides that seem the model of clarity to you are likely opaque to your students, and chopping lecture notes up onto multiple online slides won’t help. Instead, use the right tools for the job.

Instructors’ sense of self has become scarily entwined with their PPTs

You are not your PPT. If your PPT were as valuable as you, we wouldn’t need you to teach at all, would we? But you should have an inkling by now that posting a PPT online does not constitute a well-taught course. Online courses need active participation from a genuinely engaged instructor to make them successful.

My point: unlike you, your PPTs don’t have brains, insight, and something to contribute to society. Don’t give up your seat on the bus to your PPTs.

Instructors have gotten bad advice

Swept up in swine flu fever, some universities are recommending that faculty post their PPTs online, but they fail to warn instructors of the pitfalls of that approach, and they don’t all offer guidance about good ways to make material available online. Just as swine flu propagates through close contact and bad hygiene, bad PPT mythology spreads infectiously. Instructors see other instructors using PPT poorly and assume that’s the way it should be done. Don’t fall for it.

Many universities have departments whose job it is to be expert in instructional design, information design, and educational technology. Avail yourself of their services. Get some guidance and training in how to teach well online, how to design your materials for online delivery, and how to convert your PPTs into something more useful for online courses.

My point: just because other instructors use PPT badly doesn’t mean you should too.

Instructors don’t realize that not all students have equal access to PPT

Students don’t all have Microsoft Office, or they might have an older version that isn’t entirely compatible with the one instructors use to create presentations. PPTs created on Windows-based PCs don’t always display well on Macs, and tools available for Mac users aren’t on par with those for Windows users. These issues don’t matter when you project slides from your computer in an in-person classroom, but they matter a LOT when you post your PPT file online and then make the fallible assumption that students will be able to open it on whatever computer they use and see exactly the same thing you see on your computer.

Even more importantly, students who have disabilities and use assistive technologies such as screen readers might not be able to get at the information in your PPT at all unless you’ve carefully made it accessible. If your school receives federal funding, you need to be aware of Section 508 requirements to make information accessible. By posting inaccessible PPTs online and making them a required part of your course, you might invite a lawsuit.

My point: use tools that make your information available to all of your students, regardless of their preferred computing platform and need for assistive technology.

Any Exceptions?

The comments here generally apply to asynchronous online courses, those in which students can work on the course at whatever time is convenient for them, and there’s no expectation that everyone enrolled in the course will be online at the same time.

If you teach a synchronous online course, especially one that uses some kind of web conferencing features, then—assuming you’re going to be online in the course at the same time as your students and will be communicating actively with them—of course you can use your well-designed, nonboring PPTs, as long as you address the accessibility issues and fill in the gaps by using either audio or textual chat.

If Not PPT, Then What?

Ah, that’s a subject for more blog posts to come.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Under Pressure?

by John Doherty

Chippin’ around – kick my brains around the floor
These are the days it never rains but it pours
– Queen, David Bowie, “Under Pressure“

Under budget pressure from our universities, we faculty have no choice but to do more with less. Unlike Queen and Bowie, however, we cannot scream “Let me out,” so we turn to technology for some pressure relief.

Wally Nolan and I, instructional designers at Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center, discuss ways to apply technology to your courses in our weekly podcast series, Tuesday Tips on Teaching With Technology (iTunes link). But we don’t just talk about it; we practice what we preach.

For example, I have been using technology in teaching my Honors courses to help make connections amongst my students. With Kevin Ketchner, another NAU Honors instructor, I have been using Blackboard Vista to move some face-to-face community-building tasks, such as icebreakers, online. Kevin and I discuss our approach in an article we have forthcoming in the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council:

[W]e adapted and moved an icebreaker from Conrad and Donaldson (2004) to Blackboard Vista. Following some brief peer-led introductions during our first live meeting, we assigned students a Name That Movie activity in a Vista-based discussion … .  For this discussion, we asked students to respond to the prompt in a discussion thread, in part to also introduce the tool to the students. Also, this assignment was not graded, yet still received such phenomenal interactions. It generated 307 messages in one class that initially had 18 students (one later dropped out) over the course of 5 days, between our Thursday meeting and our next meeting on the following Tuesday. Our only adaptation to this activity was to have the students come to class to discuss their final responses. Walking into this Tuesday class after this activity was a different experience from the week before—it was a very noisy room, students visiting with their neighbors, discussing their movie titles and music tastes. Students were referring to each other by name and moving about the room to share movies, songs, and other similar tastes with each other. Connections had been made and a community was forming. (pp. 66-67)

At the e-Learning Center we emphasize that the adoption of technology needs to be purposeful. Too often, technology gets promoted without prior consideration of the educational implications of its adoption. Successful adoption of educational technology depends on the instructor’s understanding of the potential educational benefits of the technology, consideration of the technology’s pedagogical appropriateness for a given course, skillful implementation of the technology, and clear communication to students about how they should use the technology.

For good information on new and emerging technologies and their potential applications in education, check out the Educause Learning Initiative series titled “7 Things You Should Know About ….”

References

Conrad, R-M. & Donaldson, J.A. (2004). Engaging the online learner: Activities and resources for creative instruction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Doherty, J.J. & Ketchner, K. (2009). Making connections: Technology and interaction in an Honors classroom. Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Society 10(2): 66-68.

A Tweet a Day Keeps the Swine Flu Away

by Lorraine B. Elder

Okay, Twitter is not really the new Tamiflu, but educational technology and social media are useful tools in combating the effects of sweeping illness. The World Health Organization has declared a flu pandemic, meaning widespread human H1N1 infection is occurring. Many colleges are bracing for large numbers of flu-related absences among staff and students. Wise faculty members are planning ahead to ensure continuity of classes in the event that either they or their students are felled by flu. Here are some steps you can take.

Use Officially Supported Tools

First, try using officially supported tools at your campus. At Northern Arizona University, we recommend using Blackboard Vista for posting class materials, iTunes U for distributing podcasts, Elluminate for live web conferences, and classlists.nau.edu for sending bulk emails to all students enrolled in a class.

Use Social Media

Then in addition to those tools, consider using social media—your blog, a class wiki, Twitter—to communicate frequently with your students if you or a large number of them are ill and can’t come to class. Just be sure to tell students which social media you’re using. Blogs are good for pushing information out to students while also giving them a mechanism for offering comments and feedback. Wikis are especially good for allowing students to complete group projects even if one or more group members get sick, and by collaborating online, sick students reduce the risk of infecting their classmates. If you designate a hashtag for your class, Twitter can serve as a chat tool and discussion board.

Use File Formats Accessible to All Students

Students don’t all have access to the same versions of software that you do, so avoid posting your class materials in formats that require proprietary software. For example, you might have the latest version of Microsoft Word, but your students might have an older version or no version at all, which means they won’t be able to open your .docx files. Instead, convert your class materials to web pages that students can view in a browser. In a pinch, you can convert documents to PDFs, which students can view using Adobe Reader or other free PDF viewers. But keep accessibility in mind for students who use screen readers or other assistive technology.

Record Short, Targeted Podcasts or Webcasts

While we don’t advocate recording entire class-length lectures, we do suggest scripting and recording short (no more than 5–10 minutes each) talks or demonstrations focused on a single key point or topic in your course. Audio recordings are fine for some subjects. Others, particularly demonstrations, lend themselves to video recordings. Be sure to include transcripts, and tell students where to find the recordings. If you have access to iTunes U, post them there. If not, post them in your learning management system or on your blog.

Communicate

At the outset of your class, tell students how you will communicate with them if you become ill, and tell them which communication channels they should use to let you know when they’re sick. Take a look at the Communication Toolkit for Institutions of Higher Education. Above all, be flexible and understanding with your students. Remember that the H1N1 virus seems to affect younger people more strongly than older people, so instead of giving students grief for missing class, send them some virtual chicken soup.

Ask for Help

Most campuses have support organizations that can help you figure out which kinds of educational technology are appropriate for you and your students. Don’t hesitate to ask for guidance.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tips for Teaching Online

by Lorraine B. Elder

Dr. Judith V. Boettcher has written Teaching Online for the First Time — The Quick Guide. She lists ten best practices for designing and teaching a course, and most are spot on, with the possible exception of

Best Practice 5: Use both synchronous and asynchronous activities

Using both kinds of activities works only if your online students know up front that’s an expectation. Many students think online inherently means asynchronous, so be clear in your class description about whether synchronous activities are included in the course, and be sure to list the dates and times of the synchronous activities on a class preview page so students can figure out even before they register whether their school, work, and life schedules will permit them to be available at those times.

To Dr. Boettcher’s list, I’d add a few more implementation tips that the e-Learning Center has learned from years of working with faculty in preparing online and hybrid courses.

1. Don’t try to create an online course on the fly while you’re teaching it. You won’t like it and neither will your students.

If your in-person teaching style entails glancing at your notes—or not—a few minutes before class starts and then winging it by speaking extemporaneously, you’ll be tempted to approach online teaching the same way. Don’t do it. You’ll fumble with the technology (or it will go down at an inopportune time); you won’t have an adequate list of resources and supplemental materials available for your students; you’ll forget to include important details in your assignment instructions, confusing your students and sparking a flood of emails or discussion posts asking for clarification; and in an asynchronous course, your students will be irritated if they’re ready to proceed but you aren’t because you haven’t yet built out the course. They’re busy people, too, who don’t want you wasting their time.

2. Posting PowerPoint presentations online does not constitute an online course, no matter how many slides you include.

A bunch of bullet points out of context and lacking a speaker to fill in the details isn’t what students need. Neither are slides packed with overstuffed paragraphs. If you need to write paragraphs to convey your information, put them on a web page, not on a slide. Put the bullet points on web pages, too, and also write the information you would have said aloud in a face-to-face presentation. Or include an audio recording (with transcripts!) of what you would have said to accompany the slides.

Don’t expect students to intuit what you meant by your cryptic, one- or two-word bullets. What’s obvious to you—an expert— won’t be obvious to them—novices. Explain yourself.

I’ll have more to say on the evils of PowerPoint in a future blog post.

3. Make your course accessible to all students, including those who have disabilities.

It’s easy and desirable in an online course to include clips of rich instructional media, such as videos and audio. Be sure to include captioning or transcripts so that all students get the full benefit of the media without having to ask for special accommodations. Even students who don’t have disabilities often appreciate captions and transcripts. Also make sure your course can be navigated easily with a keyboard, not just a mouse, and check with your campus Disability Resources office to be sure that screen reader software can interpret your course material.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

We’re blogging!

To kick off the Fall 2009 semester, the e-Learning Center (ELC) is introducing our new blog. Various authors from ELC will post on topics that tickle their fancy, and we encourage the NAU community to join the conversation, either by commenting on the posts or contacting us to write guest posts. We’ll focus on educational technology, teaching and learning, instructional design, assessment, educational media, upcoming training and workshops, issues in higher ed, and the like. Some posts will be informative, some provocative, and some just for fun. Sometimes we’ll tweet about blog topics, too (we’re NAUelearning on Twitter). Or we’ll tell you about interesting things that we’ve bookmarked on Delicious.

The look of the blog will change over time as we add and refine features. If there’s something — content, features, or whatever — that you want us to add, just let us know in the comments.